Forget potboilers, top-shelf fiction makes you sensitive

Pam Belluck

New York: Reading Chekhov for a few minutes makes you better at decoding what other people are feeling. But spending the same amount of time with a potboiler by Danielle Steel does not have the same effect, scientists say.

A study released on Thursday found that reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious non-fiction, leads to people performing better at tests that measure empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence.

The empathetic kind: Marilyn Monroe was an avid reader of literary fiction.

The authors of the study, published by the journal Science, and other academic psychologists suggest such findings should be considered by educators when designing curriculums.

The study involved a series of five experiments conducted by social psychologists at the New School for Social Research in New York City. People who read excerpts from literary fiction (Don DeLillo, Alice Munro, Wendell Berry) scored better than people who read popular fiction (Gillian Flynn, Rosamunde Pilcher, Mary Roberts Rinehart) in tests asking them to infer what people were thinking or feeling - a field that scientists call ''Theory of Mind''.

People who read literary fiction also scored better than those who read non-fiction (in this case, pieces published in Smithsonian magazine, such as How the Potato Changed the World).

In two experiments, some participants read nothing at all before taking the tests, yet performed as well as the participants who read popular fiction. Both of those groups made more mistakes on the tests than literary fiction readers, reported the researchers, a psychology professor, Emanuele Castano and doctoral candidate, David Comer Kidd.

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To find a broader pool of research subjects than the university students who typically participate, the researchers used Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk service, where people sign up to earn money for completing small jobs. Between 78 and 456 people, ranging in age from 18 to 75, were recruited for each experiment and paid $US2 or $US3.

''Theory of Mind'' is a relatively new field. Tests measure a person's ability to decode emotions shown in photographs of people's faces (irritation, fear, sadness) or to predict a person's expectations or beliefs in a particular scenario. The tests have been used in efforts to gauge empathy in children with autism, for example.

But there is much the study does not address. How long lasting could such effects be?

Would three months of reading Charles Dickens and Jane Austen produce effects that are larger, smaller or have no effect? Would the results hold if the same person read all the different types of material?

Mr Kidd said that ''in popular fiction, the author is really in control and the reader has a more passive role''.

In literary fiction, such as Dostoyevsky, ''there is no single overarching authorial voice'', he said. ''Instead, each character presents a different version of reality and they aren't necessarily reliable. ''You have to participate as a reader in this dialectic, which is really something you have to do in real life.''

Dr Castano said that in many cases, ''popular fiction seems to be more focused on the plot''.

''Characters can be interchangeable and usually more stereotypical in the way they are described,'' he said.

Louise Erdrich, whose short story The Round House was used in the experiments, said she was heartened to hear of the study. ''This is why I love science,'' she wrote. ''Writers are often lonely obsessives, especially the literary ones. It's nice to be told what we write is of social value.

''(However, I would still write even if novels were useless.)''

But she also suggested that the intertwining of science and art can only be taken so far.